By now, I’m sure most people here have read Roger Ebert’s article “Video Games Can Never Be Art.” If you haven’t, I would suggest you read it. I’m not Roger Ebert’s biggest fan. I enjoy my trashy horror and action movies, thus I sometimes disagree with his views on movies, but I think he is often spot on in his criticisms. On whether video games can be art, I disagree with him… in part. I do not view most games as art, but I believe a few could be considered art.
He admits that perhaps his statement is hyperbolic, but he does stand by it. His article is largely a response to a video that I’ll admit I haven’t watched. He provides a good summary of the points he addresses and I will trust him to be fair in his representation of the video and of the speaker he’s referring to. The video Ebert is addressing is a TED talk given by Kellee Santiago. In her presentation, she uses the Wikipedia definition of art: “art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.” Using this definition she says that many games, such as Chess, cannot be considered art. However, Ebert comments that “as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.” While he could argue this, I think he would be quite wrong. The keyword of the provided definition is “deliberately.” The rules are deliberate, but the circumstances around the game are not. For this reason, I think it would be silly to consider a skirmish against a computer in Starcraft to be art. The rules are in place, but the designers have not deliberately done anything aside from setting up the rules and creating an AI that can operate within the confines of these boundaries. This is impressive – creating balanced rules for three unique sides is a challenge and creating an AI that can fairly follow the rules is worthy of praise – but it is not art. However, to say the story line of Starcraft does not have the potential to be art is silly. The scenarios are deliberately designed to further a narrative, to create emotional attachments to the characters, and to communicate ideas.
You know, we can debate Ayn Rand's skill as a writer, but we can all agree her taste in men was spectacular!
Ebert writes that “one obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game.” However, video games do blur lines. Video games are no longer about beating an opponent or a computer. Bioshock exists to tell a story, which is a critique of Ayn Rand’s utopian vision – while being just as critical of the revolutionary that rebels against the state. Do I “win” at reading when I get to the end of a particularly engrossing short story? No. Yet, video games do differ from the written word in many ways. They can present the audience with situations where characters will die due to the player’s actions. The presence of AI controlled enemies in most games serve a simple purpose – to be an obstacle to the player and to give the narrative a feeling of danger and urgency. For many games defeating the NPC enemies is not the goal in and of itself. Just like in Chess the goal is not to capture all the opponents pieces, but each piece still presents a challenge to the opposing side. In this sense, there is no respectable comparison to how video games tell stories; movies, books, and opera have no good analogous example to the ability for the audience to “lose” over the course of the narrative. I do not “lose” at reading; a book will not suddenly kill my character and tell me to return to page twenty, not unless I’m indulging in a choose-your-own-adventure book.
However, perhaps that is the best comparison to video games at the moment. I know an English student at my university that gladly awaits the day when video games are taught alongside films and literature in schools. I dread this, because expecting students to study Resident Evil is akin to having them study Goosebumps. Yeah, both works tell a story and both have a message, but the presentation is juvenile. However, at the same time I don’t think it would be so horrible to discuss Silent Hill 2 alongside The Shining. Like the previous example, both are stories meant to scare the audience, but the approach is slightly more respectable. Both explore the characters, their relationships, and the idea of sanity through the guise of a horror story. The difference is Silent Hill 2 allows the player to explore the town, find depth or to barely scratch the surface at their own will. The fact your decisions change the ending of the story allows the player to revisit the story and change the outcome, but not the themes communicated. The fact that the player is capable of dying gives the narrative a sense of urgency – you identify with a character whose mortality is enforced by that dreaded “Game Over” screen. The monsters you encounter in the course of the game were all designed to reinforce themes concerning the main character’s internal emotional state and sexual frustration. When compared to the symbolism behind the monsters in the original Silent Hill, we do see growth in the writing of Team Silent (both links taken from Translated Memories). While I do believe video games, as a whole, are a juvenile form of entertainment, that does not mean there does not exist room for exceptions or growth. I believe Team Silent’s Silent Hill games are pretty decent case studies in how games can grow.
I tend to avoid contractors that leave me notes written in their blood
Ebert goes to question whether some forms of art, such as the compositions of Stravinsky or the paintings of Picasso can contain ideas. He comments that “you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.” On this, I certainly call him out. Classical compositions are very capable of communicating an idea – Claude Debussy sought to create visuals in the head of his audience using the piano and Gustav Mahler was sometimes frustrated that audiences could not see his ideas as he wished them to be seen. I’m sure George Orwell would feel the same way when people read 1984 as an anti-socialist diatribe instead of a book that is distinctly an anti-Soviet and anti-Stalinist piece (as the novel does show appreciation to the political philosophies of Trotsky). Audiences can miss the point when they do not know the situations surrounding the creation of a story or a piece of music or a painting. This does not mean that there is not a message; many composers, authors, and painters create their art with a message in mind. But when one forgets the context in which a song, a novel, or a picture was created in, the meaning can be lost to the audience. The piece is not meaningless, the meaning is merely obscured.
However, gamers need to remember that video games are not in their infancy. Kellee Santiago makes the mighty proclamation that games show more artistic merit than the wall paintings our ancestors made. I would say this is true, but it also denies that games are stuck in a state that has made it difficult to move away from simplistic stories, mind-numbing psuedo-philsophy, and clumsy prose that are much harder for me to accept. Before games can become art, gamers and developers need to realize they are not art at this point. Cave paintings communicated the realities that hunter-gatherers societies lived in – in addition to their respect and reliance on nature. I don’t think games, as a whole, communicate any profound truths of our existence. I am confident that will change. At the same time, I doubt we’ll ever create a game that can be compared to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu or Aguirre. I think the best gamers can really hope for is to achieve the status of John McTiernan’s Die Hard or James Cameron’s Terminator 2. However, what gamer isn’t content with being Bruce Willis for a few hours a week? I love George Orwell’s 1984, but I don’t want a video game adaptation of it – it wouldn’t even be an entertaining point-and-click adventure game.
I've taken up smoking in my efforts to imitate my role model! Video games don't just do it for me when it comes to my lifelong ambition to be Bruce Willis!
Gamers need to realize that there are limitations to the medium and that technology is not the only thing holding back games. In our review of Heavy Rain, Lewis wrote that: “Heavy Rain’s biggest flaw is that the developers like their ideas just a bit too much. The opening sequence is probably the most self-indulgent and excruciatingly dull moment in a video game ever. I do not want to brush my teeth, I don’t want to have to find the plates, playing with my kids is not something I wish to simulate.” We need to realize this is what’s holding back the medium. Mundane interactions with the environment play a role in many films, as they can give depth to a situation or character. A scene I love in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is when the protagonist watches her child play with the child’s grandfather. Games will probably never have a way of recreating this sort of experience outside of a cutscene. When you require a movie (in the form of a cutscene) to tell part of a game’s story, you acknowledge your art form has limitations. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror movie Kairo has a scene I consider effective because a majority of the scene is just watching a woman do the dishes while she listens to the TV in the background. The mundane nature of the scene mixed with the supernatural going-ons help set the mood as she finds her TV screwing with her head. The Dirty Dozen is a movie in which a majority of the film is spent watching the main characters train and bond in relatively normal situations. Such scenes help the viewer identify with characters and situations; they also allow the suspension of disbelief to occur as we see the characters as people. Audience interaction in such scenes would limit the impact or just make them unappealing to experience because they would not be fun!
Are video games art? As I stated before, I would say they generally aren’t art. Ebert makes this same statement for movies, though. We have to admit that art is a pedestal to us; not everything is worthy to be called “art.” At the same time, video games do have the potential to be a legitimate art form. Was early rock and roll artistic? Not particularly, just like video games are today, early rock musicians were a bit juvenile. That does not mean Buddy Holly was a bad musician, I love his music (“Peggy Sue” is perhaps one of the catchiest rock songs ever written). However, I would not compare the rock of the 50s to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here; they’re not in the same class. Video games have had interesting obstacles to over come, they have been clearly held back by technology which limited their ability to tell stories. While video games is not misnomer, I do feel the use of the word “game” does get across a flawed idea. These are not games comparable to Risk – they often aspire to tell stories and to create a form of story telling where the audience is not a witness to the events, but part of the events. I don’t think the interaction makes it impossible to call it art, but I think gamers make it very hard to say games are an art form. The fact of the matter is, this is not even an uncommon view.
As I wrote this, I summarized Roger Ebert’s views to some gamers I know that live in my dorm and they did not disagree. One person viewed games as “art-filled,” in that they have stories, are filled with music, and even have beautiful pictures, but they are not art in and of themselves. Another person even disagreed with that. While he enjoys his RTS games and his shooters, they are not art – they are games. I believe such viewpoints serve as an important counter-balance to the “games are art!” crowd; this crowd tends to drown out the opposition in debate. We tend to put games like Metal Gear Solid on a pedestal for their stories – ignoring the clumsy, self-indulgent writing. This makes it hard to agree that games are art. Metal Gear Solid is a trashy mass produced paperback; it’s a Terry Goodkind novel. It’s fun, but self-indulgent. The “games are art!” crowd tries to find a hundred games that they can call art, when perhaps they need to be content with the efforts of Team Ico and Team Silent.
I think that games, as they exist at this point, appeal to the part of my brain that finds enjoyment from watching Spongebob Squarepants. I wouldn’t call Spongebob Squarepants art, but that doesn’t make it bad.
